Zagreb, Croatia; Where Dreams Really Do Come True

April 10, 2008

If ever a miracle happened it happened in our School of Dance (University of the Nations). Six weeks in Croatia and Italy was more than enough time to give God the opportunity to show off, which He did, nearly everyday. It has been the hardest and yet best six months of my life so far teaching much more than I could have ever expected. What my team and I experienced on outreach these last six weeks can never been confined into one blog update but I’ll try my best one city at a time.

Our first stop was Zagreb which is the capitol of Croatia. There are only three protestant churches in the entire capital, and all other churches are mostly catholic. A “good Croatian” will call themselves Catholic but many don’t have a relation with Jesus Christ, but instead simply have a Catholic way of life. Our team of 17 dancers was blessed enough to stay in one of these small, but zealous protestant churches, who provided all of our needs. We worked mostly with the small U of N base in the city. They had been praying for some help for four years and to them we were an answer to prayer. We traveled around to the different churches and taught workshops, teaching people and their children how to worship with dance, as well as advertising for a few individual shows of our own. We even got to dance in a prison which was supposed to be impossible. We were able to talk about each dance and give our own testimonies. One amazing story in Zagreb actually began before the school even started. One of the girls, Krista, had had a dream about praying in a school. One day, while praying for the city, she actually found the same school that was in her dream! They walked in and met the headmaster and the headmaster invited us to dance for the entire school. Days later, when we were dancing in the main square of the city several of the students had come to watch us and later they had several questions about God and had a lot of the Truth already in their hearts. We were able to teach them and connect them to one of the three churches we were working with.

Next we traveled to a couple of gypsie villages where a families from a small church housed us in their homes. The gypsies were very open to us. We played with the kids and even danced for them on a dirt road! Afterwards, they actually came to the church where we were doing a workshop. This is a huge deal because gypsies rarely come into the society of Croatians. When one of our girls gave a testimony after teaching hip hop, one of the gypsie girls said with tears streaming down her cheeks that “I’ve never known the God that you know” and she wanted to accept Jesus as her savior! We only had one hitch the entire trip. Coming back from the gypsie village, one of the girls had randomly dropped her passport in a bathroom in a restaurant and the police actually found it, contacted where we were registered and called us, all of which happened in one hour. Two girls were able to go back and get the passport before our eight hour train left for the next city, Split, Croatia. God literally took care of us with every detail.